Real Estate Is Not the True Path to Wealth, Business Is
Scaling your business to 50+ deals a year takes a lot of legwork, planning, delegating, measuring and pivoting when necessary. Focus on your current business level before taking steps that you would at your future business level. For example, in chess, you need to think multiple steps ahead, but making future moves in the present does not win the game. The Scaling Your Business videos series by Grant Kemp addresses each step of business growth. 1) How to Get Your First Wholesale Deal – https://youtu.be/wMZ5fKFCr4k. 2) How to Wholesale at Least One Deal a Month – https://youtu.be/Mv78xaftexk. 3) Getting to Multiple Deals a Month – https://youtu.be/1pYaaBRKU9M. Real estate investing is not the true path to wealth. It creates wealth, but the true path to wealth is business. Once you understand the principals, you can apply them to any business.
Delegate and Elevate
When you first start a business, you must be all positions (acquisitions, marketing, follow up, dispositions, etc.). However, you will reach your personal capacity at some point, at which, you will be unable to scale any further. Often people build a system that supports their job as opposed to building a business that works for you. A business runs operations with employees running key aspects of it and the owner can step away. You must take the time to document and automate all the tasks that you must do at the beginning, or you will never create a business, rather a perpetual job. Shift your mindset from “In order to buy houses, I have to send marketing flyers” to “In order to buy houses, marketing must be sent.” The job must be done, but it doesn’t have to be done by you. Once you are doing multiple deals a month, you understand the process of buying houses, but you may not be good at creating systems, documenting processes and assigning tasks.
Grow Through Accountability
Accountability Chart Example
An Accountability Chart creates a structure that clarifies roles and responsibilities so that accountability is clear. It defines clear reporting lines, facilitates efficient decision making and problem solving, enables open communication so employees know who to work with to get things done and identifies all the available “seats” within a company. Gary Harper offers training programs on how to build a business and think like a business owner – www.SharperProcess.com. The Accountability Chart is a hierarchy chart shows what employees would you need if your business was fully scaled and 5 or so bullet points defining the roles within each job. Every company has at least the following three divisions: Finance, Operations, Sales/Marketing and great businesses must have a Visionary and an Integrator. If you are a visionary, you should be looking for your integrator from day one. Finding the perfect visionary/integrator relationship is extremely difficult. Most real estate investors are visionaries. A Visionary is the CEO role who is focused on the big picture and understanding what can happen, does the R&D, big relationships, networking, creative big problem solver. The Integrator is the COO role who understands the Visionary’s big picture and how to articulate and execute it. They lead, manage, accountability, read financials, P&L Business planning, remove obstacles and barriers, special projects, leads meetings, track trends and strategize accordingly. The books Traction by Gino Wickman (http://amzn.to/2kavg32) and What the Heck is EOS? By Gino Wickman and Tom Bouwer help illustrate the accountability chart.
Your Team Determines Your Trajectory
Every hire you make is intentional and an investment who is there to bring revenue to the company. Each one of those seats will make you money. Hire solely based on getting the job done the correct way. In the beginning you will wear many hats. Each one of those seats is a hat that someone hat to wear. People often ask, who do I need to hire first? There are 2 reasons why you should hire 1) What are you failing at? 2) What do you hate doing? If you are doing business ownership correctly, you can do only the things you like. Meetings are critical to moving a business forward. You must have a weekly meeting with your team and weekly meetings with your leadership separate from the employees along with quarterly and annual meetings.
Three Important Letters: K P I
One of the most critical parts of growing your business is defining and understanding KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are measurable data points that allow the owners to quickly assess the performance of the company and each employee within it. When you are building your KPIs, look at leading, not lagging numbers. For example, “How many marketing pieces went out and how many contracts came in?” Tracking the number of closings is a lagging indicator because of the time lag from receiving the contract to the actual closing. If you see the number of contracts dropping, you can take corrective action in time to prevent financial issues. Look at the KPIs and determine how well your company is doing and adjust as needed.
